


ignorance (is your new best friend)

by anythingbutplatonic



Series: Tick, Tick, Boom. [2]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Meeting - Suicide Squad, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4401749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anythingbutplatonic/pseuds/anythingbutplatonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Felicity Smoak is one of the world's best hackers. 5 years ago, she was betrayed and arrested by the FBI for crimes ranging from fraud to the theft of highly classified intel. Now, she works for ARGUS as a member of Task Force X, better known as the Suicide Squad.</p><p>Oliver Queen is a captain of the Solntsevskaya Bratva. 3 months ago, he was arrested by the KGB and handed over to ARGUS. He is their newest recruit for the Suicide Squad.</p><p>They might be friends, if they don't kill each other first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ignorance (is your new best friend)

Felicity hadn’t meant to stare. 

It just sort of…. _happened_.

It had been a few weeks since the mysterious and reclusive new recruit had joined their ranks, a few weeks since she and the man known only as “The Arrow” had exchanged few words and fewer pleasantries, except to establish the fact that he was not someone who liked to talk. And he especially did not like to talk about anything relating to his personal life.

In those few weeks, Felicity had come to regret offering up the two small pieces of personal information she had given him; her real name, and where she had been born. Granted, he had responded in kind to the latter, telling her that he had been born and raised in Moscow and had no living relatives. 

It almost didn’t matter that she was at least eighty percent sure it had been a lie.

So when Felicity passed by his cell on her way back from the cafeteria (where he had, yet again, been absent, as he had been for almost every meal since he’d arrived) she had fully intended to keep her eyes averted and  _not_  search him out, if not for any other reason than the fact that some of her more… _unstable_  colleagues didn’t take kindly to being looked at. Or being forced to partake in eye contact. With anyone. 

She  _really_  didn’t like the idea of having her eyes scratched out by Carrie “Call me Cupid” Cutter. She wanted to keep both of her eyes, thank you very much. 

It therefore wasn’t her fault that she passed by his cell when he was in the middle of what looked like a pretty intensive workout routine, swinging from a steel structure built into the floor of the cell that she was pretty sure was called a Salmon Ladder. 

And it  _definitely_  wasn’t her fault that he was half-naked whilst doing so, his standard-issue orange jumpsuit hanging off his (unfairly slim) waist as he went up and down that stupid ladder, drawing Felicity’s attention and stopping her dead in her tracks.

Because,  _damn._ Just,  _damn_.

The regulation orange jumpsuits that everyone on “Task Force X” was made to wear? Did absolutely nothing for the impressive physique of the man she now watched, mesmerized, wondering if Topless Tuesdays was something that could be arranged because she would happily watch him walk around with no shirt any day of the week, even if he was practically mute most of the time and didn’t speak a single word to anyone. 

She’d known he was tall, broad, and at least seventy-five percent brawn (though no estimate was yet available on the amount of brains he possessed) but she certainly wasn’t expecting him to be so powerfully built, his shoulders and back and arms practically  _made_  of steely-hard muscle and more than capable of supporting the rest of him as he swung up and down, up and down, over and over like it was pre-programmed into his brain. 

“I  _really_  need to work out more,” Felicity murmured to herself as she watched him. “Maybe Waller was right about me needing to expand my skill set.”

“Talkin’ to yourself, blondie?” a sickly-sweet, bubblegum voice piped up from somewhere behind her and Harley breezed past, greasy hair pulled into two braids just below her ears. 

“You’re blonde, too!” Felicity called out after her, a knee-jerk reaction; she never really knew what to say to Harley, who seemed to be in a world of her own most of the time. Maybe it was the tattoo that said ROTTEN stretching across the right side of her jaw that made Felicity want to stay away. 

And where did she get that gum she was always chewing, anyway? 

“Yeah, but mine’s real,” she grinned, blowing a bubble of gum and popping it with a  _snap_. 

 _Damn her_. Yeah, sure, Felicity had been dying her hair blonde for years, but where was the problem with that? And what right did Harley have to call her out on it? 

“I’m ignoring you now,” Felicity said pointedly, turning away from her and back towards The Arrow’s cell, where she was disappointed to see that he had climbed down from the ladder and was drying himself off with a small hand towel, his back to circular window through which she had been watching him. 

She did, however, manage to get a better look at the strange black shape on his shoulder that she had noticed earlier, which she now saw was a tattoo of some kind. Upon closer study, she could make out the shape of a Chinese dragon, stretching across the whole expanse of his shoulder blade, the flames from the dragon’s mouth curling upwards and disappearing out of sight over the curve of his shoulder.

Russian accent. Chinese dragon tattoo. A refusal to tell her his real name. And some pretty impressive muscles that would rival those of a professional body-builder. 

He sparked her curiosity and made her mouth dry up whenever he so much as looked at her, her inability to deny that he was attractive forcing her to want to get closer, to find out more, to solve his mystery. 

Because mysteries must always be solved. She was determined to solve his. 

But first, she had to take a long, ice-cold shower and try to erase the image of his strong, supple body going up and down that ladder from her mind. It might help if she reminded herself, first and foremost, of where they were and what they were doing.

 After all, it was much more difficult to fantasize about licking beads of sweat off of your colleague’s back if you remembered that there was a miniature bomb embedded in his spine.


End file.
